We’ve said repeatedly that the Moto X is more than just specs on a page and that — despite not having the best of everything — it’s still a one-of-a-kind phone. How true is that, though? Can you recreate the Motorola X suite of features with apps found in the Google Play Store? We grabbed an HTC One Google Play edition and loaded as many apps as we could find that claimed to replicate the Moto X feature set to see what we could come up with.

Especially now that Google’s X phone has been released, you’ll find a lot of apps now that claim to add its features to other handsets. Any amount of forum crawling will also point you towards hardcore Android fans who have tried to emulate the X’s features using complex apps like Tasker, which allow you to do an incredible amount with your phone so long as you know exactly how to use the app.

There’s also a decent list of one-off apps trying to add individual features and building their own list of tools as their users provide feedback. Dynamic Notifications and Open Mic+ were two apps in particular that stood out, thanks to either user feedback or their own boasting, as being especially loud in their claims that they can serve up what the Moto X offers.

I took a look at each of these three services, separately and together, to see how they held up against the Moto X.

The truth is that no combination of these apps — even when paired with the formidable HTC One — stood a chance against the Moto X. Each are perfectly capable of delivering similar experiences, and those experiences may be close enough for some users, but in no way are any of these apps capable of replicating the features found on Motorola’s latest phone.

Open Mic+ can be set up to launch Google Now by saying “OK Google Now” (or any other phrase for that matter), but it is nowhere near as fast or as accurate as the Moto X. Furthermore, even when you have the app set to only work when the phone is awake, the app is a huge battery hog. Another app that supports this feature is Utter but you’ll quickly find that the voice feature is one of a thousand in the app, with very poor navigation, and still is not as accurate as the Moto X.

Dynamic Notifications is the closest of the apps we tested to provided a reasonable facsimile of the Active Display function. You can go in and set what notifications show up on the screen, and you can set the app up to deliver those messages in a breathing pulse on the display even when the screen is off, but it’s still really not the same experience. You can’t swipe to dismiss notifications, the ability to see your notifications by moving the phone is unreliable, and on multiple occasions the feature would interrupt other actions on the phone to deliver a notification by blacking out the screen and showing the pulsing icon.

The shake-to-launch function in Tasker does exactly what it says it will do: you can quickly set the phone up so you can shake and launch the camera. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work when the screen is off, and it requires a significant amount of fine tuning in order to avoid launching the camera accidentally when using other apps. It’s possible, if you really tweak Tasker, to mostly re-create the feature. If you’ve got the hour to kill, and don’t mind that it’s still not exactly the same, go for it. (TwistyLancher is an alternative that is much easier to use, but the HTC One is not currently supported.)

In the end, the answer is a resounding no. You can not completely emulate the Moto X feature set in software. The benefits of the X8 computer system, with its contextual computing processor and its natural language processor, is capable of offering features that only work well because of the hardware. There are some features that could more accurately be emulated, like Motorola’s bluetooth trusted features or some of the contextual features inside of Motorola Assist (see our review for more information on these features), but these hardware enhanced features are exactly that — hardware enhanced features that Motorola can wield as unique to their platform.